Thursday, January 6, 2011

Another GREAT day in snowy Korea!

Yep, it's great. GRRRREEEAAAAT. In the completely sarcastic non-great kind of way. First of all, there were no parents in my parents class today, so my Vice Principal got irritated and although he quite likes me and so didn't segue into the full-blown angry yelling boss, he was still being an arse about it. Apparently my co-teacher Paige (who doesn't even come to the classes with me because she has her own at the same time) should be calling all of the parents every day to make sure they come and basically harassing them into attending, because their own busy schedhules are not sufficient excuse enough to miss a class most of them don't want to come to anyway. Why we can't just cancel them entirely and run something more worthwhile I don't know - say like an extra conversation class, perhaps for the 3rd years that I don't teach and so don't see all year anyway, some of whom would probably be interested in taking it before they go to high school next year and the hardwork really starts. I tried suggesting that to him but I don't think he was listening, because he just looked at me, nodded vaguely, and then answered an incoming call on his mobile. This also means grief for Paige, because he's sure to nag her about it.

So anyway, that part of the day sucks. The other part that sucks, or perhaps makes the sucky things more sucky, is that I currently have no cold water in my apartment. Although I'm very grateful that it's the cold water that's out and not the hot, it's still a pain in the butt, especially because I came home to discover this last night after I'd already used my toilet, only to find that it wouldn't flush because there was no water in the cistern. Don't worry - it was only a number one, but it was still annoying that I had to fill up the cistern by hand with a bucket to flush my loo, and because I didn't get home until about 2am, it was too late to call my neighbour to call our landlord to see if it could be fixed. Luckily he came by today so he now knows about the problem and is hopefully getting it fixed. I guess I'm just going to have to use the nasty toilet in the lobby of my building for a while until then. Apparently it's only our floor though so at least there'll only be the five of us (or possibly six since I'm still convinced my weird neighbour with the weird OCD light switch flicking habit has his girlfriend living with him) queueing in the lobby. It's kind of weird though - even though the cold water is out, my tap keeps dripping if I leave it in the off position over cold, and occasionally streaming water late at night, so I've taken to tying a dishcloth around it in a kind of washerwoman's bandanna to soak up the water and stop the noise. Ever wondered what a faucet with a toothache looks like? I'd like to imagine it looks something like mine does right now.

There are also another couple of reasons why I'm so irritated today but there's enough negativity here so I'll leave it as is and instead move onto my eternal fountain of entertainment - my students. We've been making a newspaper in our conversation class this week, and yesterday we did fortune telling and paper chatterboxes (with some stupid answers - explaining why "your mama" is funny to a bunch of Korean teenagers was hard but totally worth it), so I asked them to write predictions for each other. Here are some of the results (I tidied them up a little):

Ji-Soo will be taller than me - Yes

Sunny’s teeth will be healthy this year. -For sure

Soyeong will have a boyfriend -your mama!

Hyeon-Jeong will eat mushrooms - No way!

Won-Min will meet a handsome boyfriend - you smell!

Amy teacher will maybe go back to Australia. But Amy should stay in Korea because Korea is super good than Australia.

And my favourite (and the best) by Dae-Ho.
Paige Teacher's luck this year:

She will meet a good boyfriend in Europe this year. Paige and her boyfriend will fall in love very quickly so Paige will want to only date for 5 years and then get married, because she doesn’t have any money. However her boyfriend will have lots of money. So they will get married in Europe. They won’t want to have children. However they will travel to very beautiful sites and will live happily ever after.

Oh and a picture of the costumes they made for each other when they had to invent a country and come up with some public holidays, traditions, a flag and clothes.